Saturday, March 4, 2017

The Ruse Kruise, Part 1

It all started innocently enough.

Jason Kusion, patriarch of the Kusion family, is easily one of the most famous gankers in EVE history. When Jason decided to create a corporation for the Kusion clan, he and Globby--the notorious Goon inventor of hyperdunking--saw an opportunity.

The result was a post on Reddit claiming that Jason had stolen 500 billion isk in assets from CODE. after quarreling with loyalanon about how to split loot. From the perspective of its authors, the story seemed silly enough. For one thing, CODE. has never maintained stockpiles of anywhere near 500 billion isk. (Unlike the great powers of nullsec, we use what we have, rather than hoarding it.) For another thing, loyalanon was permabanned from EVE nearly a year ago. Needless to say, he doesn't spend much time fighting with people over loot-sharing structures.

The story may have lacked credibility, but it had a mighty receptive audience. The Reddit crowd went into a fit of ecstasy. With 92% upvotes, it instantly rocketed to the top of the EVE subreddit. They bought the story completely.

Word soon spread to the Anti-Ganking channel, its chatter faithfully logged by New Order spies.

It seemed the Anti-Gankers were willing to believe anything, as long as it received enough upvotes on Reddit. But then things got turned up a notch.

Not wanting to miss out on the action, loyalanon jumped in with an even more unbelievable story. His own Reddit post claimed that he'd been my alt all along, and that the loss of the 500 billion isk cache also meant the end of MinerBumping.

One would think that loyalanon's story was too outrageous even for the carebear-centric gaggle of EVE redditors. Yet it, too, immediately rode a wave of upvotes to the top of the subreddit.

The Anti-Gankers were stunned by this new development. Being more familiar with the history of loyalanon's permaban, they began to spin conspiracy theories.

Regardless of the truth of loyalanon's story, one thing was certain: CODE. was finished, once and for all. Again.

The only downside to this tremendous news was that Anti-Ganking couldn't take any credit for the 500 billion isk heist or the impending cancellation of MinerBumping.

...On the other hand, these are Anti-Gankers we're talking about. Having failed to achieve a victory in all these years, they'll take what they can get.

Any skepticism was immediately stamped out. There would be no raining on this parade. If this "CODE. is dead" event turned out to be another false alarm, it would be heartbreaking.

It was fairly obvious it was a ruse all along. The theft part -may- have been true, however the whole "it's the end of code!!" didn't make sense.

Code doesn't own sov, doesn't have much in the way of assets except in NPC stations and has tens of billions in isk to use on ships that cost a few mil a go. It didn't make any sense that it would be disbanding.

It was really something to watch people not applying basic logic to something just because they so badly wanted it to be true.

Some folks will believe anything - if they ardently wish it to be true.

I gave the initial story a sideways glance, but continued with my New Order activities, like the dedicated Agent I am.

As the early reporters stumbled over one another in a kind of frantic and frankly ludicrous race, each determined to outdo his rival in the Drama Stakes, it became clear that something was going on. But what?

By the time it was over, I still had only the vaguest idea about the putative sequence of events. Now, at last, James decides to tell all.

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